PI: One of the reasons that the Pearl Street Station didn't cause people to suddenly say, "Oh, I want a central station in my town" was that this was a very expensive station. Now admittedly, it was a demonstration plant so the costs were pretty high. But even still, it was over $300,000 to install this plant. And there weren't many places where you were going to get investors who were willing to invest that kind of money.

So, in fact, when Edison, in fact, goes out to install central stations elsewhere, most of the systems he installs are not underground. It's only in some of the larger towns that he actually installs underground stations. And they're not as expensive as Pearl Street. He finds ways to cut costs. But, in fact, he develops another system for smaller towns where overhead wires are used. And he finds various ways to make it a less and less expensive system, so that, in fact, now it becomes economical.

And now there becomes a period where people are beginning to say, Well, hey, you know, maybe, a central station's a good idea. It'll bring notoriety to our town. We'll be seen as progressive. And so more and more people begin to see electric light as the future instead of this expensive but not very effective technology that they might invest in.

PI: The year that Edison spent promoting and installing central stations demonstrated something very important, that is that central stations didn't sell themselves. And so, after a year, the Edison Electric Light Company finally began to realize that, you know, they could make money off of this but, in fact, it required some effort. They were willing to take over the central station business and to begin to sell it. And so now by putting on a promotional effort, central stations began to spread and other companies began to jump into the act as well and new central stations began to spring up in town after town.

PI: By the time that Edison had died, in October of 1931, Central Stations, in fact, were not just the future but the present. And the country was so wired that by the time he died, when [President] Herbert Hoover wanted to create a memorial to Edison by having the country turn off its power for a minute, he was told that this would be impossible. And, in fact, what happened as a result was that lights were dimmed in individual buildings.

PI: Well, as they were laying the mains for the Pearl Street station, winter came along and it was a rather cold winter, and all of a sudden they found that digging up the ground became a very difficult thing and it really slowed down work on the conductors. Winter demonstrated something else -- that Edison was going to have trouble with his meter because of the freezing cold. And so he had to redesign the meter, and, in fact, put a little electric light-bulb in the meter to keep it heated up since it was a chemical meter where the deposit -- like a battery -- would deposit metal from one electrode to the other. That's how the meters worked, and because the chemicals would freeze, he needed to find a way to keep it warm.

PI: The process of laying the mains involved digging up the street, putting down these conductors in tubes, setting up junction boxes so they could take the lines off in different directions. They had to pour in the tar coating that they were using for the conductors. Then they had cover everything back up. They had to test it to make sure that it worked before they covered it up. Some of the workmen were concerned about, you know, the "devil in the wires" as they called it; whether, in fact, this new technology was safe, and that was one of the key things that Edison had to do. For example, he goes to the Board of Fire Insurance Underwriters in New York to demonstrate his safety fuse. For example, he had to design a safety fuse to show that inside wiring would be safe. And so the safety concerns became a big part of the story for Edison as he designed a system.

PI: One of the key elements of Edison's work in technology was that, even if he began with just a component of the system, that is -- well, how do you build an incandescent lamp that will work -- he was always concerned about the way it fit into the larger system. And as he thought about these system requirements, he would begin to think about the relationships of the different components to each other. And that, combined with the resources of the laboratory allowed him to leapfrog over everybody. His closest competitor in America, a fellow named William Sawyer, was busy working on the lamp but he wasn't working on generators. He wasn't working on meters. He wasn't working on sockets -- all the different parts of the system that he needed. And Edison was able to do this, in part, because he had this larger vision, including, in fact, this notion of the high resistance lamp, which Sawyer and others didn't understand, and of the various requirements of the components themselves, and how they interacted with each other.

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